Page 5 of Time Loops & Meet Cutes
I look up. There’s an East Asian man crouched on the ground, about a meter away from me. He has a concerned smile on his face and a tray of food in his hand.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
I nod, becauseI think I’m trapped in a time loopisn’t the sort of thing you can say to a stranger. At least, not without them concluding you’re in even worse shape than they initially feared.
The stranger is about my age. He’s dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. He doesn’t look as if the duct tape holding him together has been ripped off; he doesn’t look as if he’s freaking out because the day is repeating itself. I seem to be the only one with that problem.
Though since I didn’t eat the dumplings today, maybe tomorrow actually will be June 21. The fact that the booth isn’t here suggests that the dumplings did, indeed, have something to do with my weird predicament. It seems like the most logical conclusion, even if it’s utterly preposterous.
I imagine how I must look to him. Dark brown hair that reaches below my shoulders. Ambiguously Asian features—I have been mistaken for a wide variety of ethnicities over the years. Slightly red eyes, thanks to the crying. An unremarkable thirty-two-year-old woman, despite the remarkable, terrifying thing that seems to be happening to me.
“Is there anything I can get for you?” he asks.
I shake my head, and he hesitates before standing up and walking away.
When I get home, I put the ube halaya pandesal in a container, make sure my alarm isn’t on, and change into my blue plaid pajama shorts—the last two nights, I wore my red ones. I’m not sure I’ll be able to fall asleep, worried as I am, but eventually, I do.
Once again, I wake up to my alarm.
And once again, I’m wearing red plaid shorts.
Shit.
3Noelle
June 20, Version 3
Wordle taunts me withh-a-p-p-y, and all my work on the proposal is gone. I want to tear out my hair in frustration because it feels like nothing I do matters. It’ll all be erased tomorrow… when I repeat June 20 rather than actually getting to June 21.
I slump in my kitchen chair as I sip my coffee. What’s the point in repeating the day if I can’t make any progress on that proposal? Why even bother going to the office?
Seriously. Why bother working?
I freeze as a terrible idea overtakes me. In the decade since I started working for Woods & Olson, I’ve only taken a single sick day. A handful of times when I wasn’t feeling well, I worked from home rather than going in. Last time, I remember racing to the washroom to throw up, then returning to my living room fifteen minutes later to review some drawings. I am a dedicated employee. You can count on me to get shit done.
Yet here I am, telling my boss via email that I’m too sick to work.
Though maybe it’s not a lie. Being stuck in a single day could be a form of illness. But this isn’t all in my mind, right? I mean, Wordle is the same. That’s proof. My pajamas. Themissing pandesal, which I definitely put on my counter last night. They’re all proof.
What exactly is happening?
I’m an engineer. I can figure this out.
My first task is to prove that this is working how I think it is. Test my hypotheses. Scientific method and all that. I start composing a to-do list, which I assume won’t exist tomorrow—my first hypothesis.
Write a few sentences in the proposal. Confirm that once again, they’re missing tomorrow.
Rewatch a few episodes ofThe Office. Hypothesis: tomorrow, Netflix won’t remember where I am in the series.
Text Dalton. Hypothesis: tomorrow, today’s text conversation with my brother will have disappeared.
Tell my parents something and see if they remember it tomorrow. Hypothesis: they won’t.
Buy something with my credit card. Hypothesis: tomorrow, there will be no record of it.
Speaking of money… I open my wallet and check how much cash I have. There’s a ten-dollar bill, but I know I used my last ten buying noodles yesterday.
I can buy whatever I want. There are no consequences.
